Posts from November 12, 2005

So, you can now buy the program for last Sundays Manchester United game against Chelsea in WH Smiths.

I used to go to Old Trafford every fortnight in the late 70s and 80s (Stretford Paddock, Stretford End, United Road). Part of the experience was travelling there, getting to the ground early, securing your position on a barrier, reading the program, the atmosphere building, the smell of pies and bovril, the chanting, the opposition fans, the players warming up, the tension, the goals, the celebrations, the moaning, everything.

Then I moved away from Manchester and was relegated to a barstool correspondent and finally a slave to Sky Sports in my armchair. Still, at least now, I can read the program a full week after the game has finished.

I was investigating the bewildering world of trackbacks, pingbacks and blog comments and found that my existing provider, blogger.com, supports backlinks (inbound links to a specific article from a Google search) but not trackbacks.

Then I discovered Wordpress.org which is a blogging tool that supports proper trackbacks, pingbacks (and a whole lot more besides). Although Wordpress is a freely available OpenSource PHP based application, I would need to upgrade my current web hosting to include PHP (for the massive sum of an additional 4GBP per month).

Then I discovered the hosted service Wordpress.com which offers the same functionality so I registered for an invitation email. A little more research unearthed the useful fact that the recently released Flock browser also includes a free Wordpress.com account. I immediately downloaded Flock and got myself this new, shiny Wordpress blog.

I like the blog editing facilities (you can tag each post in multiple categories) which may render that tedious task of manually adding Technorati tags obsolete.

Pros: trackbacks, pingbacks, categories, builtin referrer tracking, immediate WSIWYG preview, automatic Technorati pings

Cons: no direct access to Web server logs and statistics, need to manually import existing blog from blogger, centred formatting, need to burn new feed, lose thousands of readers

I have got an old radio cassette in my car with a aerial mounted in the rear windscreen. The MW reception is pretty poor and if you go under a bridge, the interference nearly makes your ears bleed. As I listen to Radio 5 Live quite a lot, this is rather irritating.

After months of prevaricating and thinking, I impetuously went out and bought a Sony DAB6650. This is a DAB radio (with FM/MW/LW as well) and a CD player. The unit looks and sounds great and I now have access to lots of different DAB stations.

Although I haven't travelled that far yet, the digital sound quality is excellent, even in towns and under bridges.

The only slight downside is that the CD formats include MP3 or Atrac but does not include WMA. Unfortunately all my CD's are ripped in WMA format but I have a handful also copied in Atrac format for my Sony MD player.

Dear Reader

We had some great times on blogger together but all good things must come to an end.

I just feel we need a break from each another. I need some time to think and some personal space (on Wordpress) and there is no other ISP involved. Please - believe me.

The Web site hits were bubbling up nicely, the feedburner circulation peaked at 14 and we even had a couple of people referring to and commenting on this blog.

However, unfortunately my owner's head has been turned by the use of 'categories', an RSS feed for 'Comments', trackback links which he still doesn't understand and a new, trendy beta version of a blogging platform used by the Scobleizer (and Eddie Awad) so he has dumped me in favour of http://andyc.wordpress.com/

Wordpress automatically provides a feed for the new blog from http://andyc.wordpress.com/feed/ and a separate feed for comments (which is a nice idea) - http://andyc.wordpress.com/comments/feed/

My owner also deleted and recreated the Feedburner feed despite the dire warnings (he was too stupid to fathom out the fancy auto-redirection) so http://feeds.feedburner.com/AndyC may or may not still work or you might have to remove and recreate it.

After all we have been through, you still mean a lot to me and I hope that we can still be good friends.

All my love

The Blogger bytestream that was 'Blog in isolation'